Introduction

Today we have two rather unique CPU cooling devices from CoolIT Systems, an US company who’s making great advances in providing large OEMs (Dell, Shuttle, Alienware, Velocity) with quality products. CoolIT first product on the market was not much PC related, a USB powered beer can chiller. This proof of concept showed their dedication to bringing Peltier/TEC cooling to the masses.

Earlier this year they launched two retail products for the enthusiast ($399) Freezone and ($199) Eliminator. These two cooling units we are testing today on our hot running Pentium 4 system.



We have tested TEC Cooled products in the past, the Activecool AC4G was from back in the AMD Athlon XP era and used an air cooled heatsink to remove the heat from the CPU and TEC; CoolIT’s approach is quite different.

CoolIT decided to create a compact water cooling kit with radiator, pump and exhaust fan, to give it an edge they attached several TEC units which aim to keep the water inside the loop cool. The radiator is connected to the hot side of the TEC and is kept from overheating by a 92x92x38mm thick fan.

Please note that for the installation of the Freezone you need mounting holes for a 92/120mm in the back of the case, the Eliminator only works with a 120mm exhaust mounting setup.

Before we introduce the first CoolIT product, let’s recap our heatsink testing method and setup:

S775 Test Setup and Methodology

We build a new S775 system with new parts from Alternate.de, the CPU is one hot running Pentium 4 524, 3.06Ghz. It is mounted on a Swiss-army knife equivalent of motherboards: an Asrock 775Dual-VSTA.



The mounting system on S775 is quite straight forward and well thought out, 4 holes around the socket serve as mounting points for the push pins on the standard Intel cooler. Installation is a snap, and removal is very easy too.



With the stock cooling and at stock voltage the 3Ghz P4 was running stable at 3.68Ghz, quite a nice improvement from default speeds.

A Watt Meter recorded peak power consumption under heavy CPU load at 138W, which is less than our previous Athlon 64 setup which consumed up to 165W. The Asrock bios lacks CPU voltage manipulation, so at default voltage is seems this Prescott setup is more power friendly then the over-volted AMD system.

We’re using a compact Antec Sonata II mid tower case, swapped out the PSU for a passive model from FSP rated at 400W, the outside of the PSU case never went past 40°C during our stress tests,

Intel S775 Setup
CPU	Pentium 4 524 @ 3628Mhz - 1.36v vcore
Mainboard	Asrock 775Dual-VSTA
Memory	1 * 512Mb Mushkin PC3200 LVLII V2
Other	Antec Sonata II with AcoustiFan DustPROOF 120mm @ 5v in the rear as outtake (mounted with soft-mounts) ATI R9000 Passive Cooling FSP ZEN 400W Passive Cooled PSU Seagate 7200.8 200Gb HDD in Scythe Quiet Drive

in-take temperature was measured at 22°C for all tests, but temp fluctuations, different mounting and user error can account up to 1-3°C of inaccuracy in the obtained results. Please keep this in mind when looking at the results. Each heatsink was tested repeatedly; if we got questionable results the test was restarted.


example: dBA meter is placed right at the edge of the case - with side panel removed

Noise level of each HSF combo was recorded with SmartSensor SL4001A, the sensor was placed ~5cm away from the side of the case with panel removed. The lowest dBA reading in the test room was 37.8dBAwith system running without HSF fan.

System was stressed by running K7 CPU Burn for 30min (after Thermal Compound's burn-in); this application pushes the temperature higher than any other application or game we've yet encountered. Speedfan was used to log maximum obtained temperatures.

Arctic Silver kindly send us their “Lumière” thermal testing compound which has the same colour as Ceramique, but only a break in time of 30min!

Arctic Silver's ArctiClean was used to clean off thermal paste of the CPU and heatsink between tests